NEW YORK — An exhibit of works by James Turrell at the Guggenheim Museum will probably become
the blissed-out environmental art hit of the summer.

The main reason: the ravishing
Aten Reign, an immense, elliptical, almost-hallucinatory play of light and color that
makes brilliant use of the rotunda and ocular skylight at the museum.

The Guggenheim exhibit marks one of three celebrating the art of the 70-year-old Turrell, a
leading member of the groundbreaking Light and Space generation of artists from the late 1960s in
Los Angeles.

The most comprehensive is underway at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine
Arts in Houston is showing seven works from its collection.

The Guggenheim’s effort is the largest temporary installation ever undertaken by Turrell or the
museum.

In addition to
Aten Reign, the exhibit — continuing through Sept. 25 — includes four earlier installation
pieces that summarize Turrell’s single-minded trajectory.

The artist often calls light and space his materials. The curators have taken him at his word,
editing out his more gimmicky efforts, emptying the museum and turning it into a spare, unhurried
tour of his art.

Aten Reign can make you feel like Richard Dreyfuss on the verge of vindication in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: It sometimes suggests the underside of a giant
spaceship landing.

Its concentric ellipses of glowing color emanate from an elaborate five-tier structure of white
fabric scrims and computerized lights inserted into the rotunda’s cylindrical space by way of
considerable engineering expertise and, one assumes, a good-sized budget.

With his Old Testament white beard and Quaker background, Turrell sometimes seems like a
mystical seer. On one wall of the Guggenheim, he intones that, in his work, light “is not the
bearer of revelation; it is the revelation.”

But the visionary persona is mainly a result of Turrell’s still-unfinished magnum opus: the
Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona on which he began working in 1979. He has devoted
decades and untold sums of money to outfitting its distinctive topography with tunnels, rooms and
skyscapes, reshaping it into an earthwork-cum-naked-eye-observatory that has pharaonic
overtones.

Photos of the crater in the catalog for the Los Angeles show suggest that it might be overdone,
seeming in some chambers to be more like a temple than an observatory. It is a strange culmination
for an artist whose roots lie in the dematerialization of the art object.

Turrell came of age at a time when the physical art object was often being jettisoned by artists
in favor of language, performance, video or working outdoors.His anti-object tendencies seem to
have come into focus so early that there is almost no transitional phase.